March 19, 2019 12:54 PM UTC

Minority Leader, "Recall Director"--Now THAT'S Statesmanship

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• by: Colorado Pols

Here’s the email blast that went out at 10:00AM from House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, writing in his alternate capacity as the newly-minted “Director” of Recall Colorado–an organization Neville is as of now fundraising for under the family’s Values First Colorado PAC to initiate recall elections against fellow House members:

From: “Rep. Patrick Neville” <director@recallcolorado.org>
Date: March 19, 2019 at 10:01:48 AM MDT
Subject: Democrats overreaching again
Reply-To: director@recallcolorado.org

Democrats in the General Assembly are rolling out an agenda that spits in the face of our Colorado values.

From undermining our ability to choose our President, to an unconstitutional gun grab, to indoctrinating students against parents’ wishes, Democrats are forcing overreaching legislation despite widespread opposition by Coloradans like you.

We’re launching a statewide effort to recall some of the worst Democrat offenders, and your support will be critical to ensuring our elected officials respect the will of the voters.

Will you help launch these recall efforts by chipping in $10, $25, $50 or even more today?

As you can see, Minority Leader Neville is dispensing with any pretense of separation between himself and his recall committee, presumably staffed and operated by the Neville family’s in-house political consultant firm Rearden Strategic. This would seem to be a deliberate choice, since either Neville’s father ex-Sen. Tim Neville or brother and longtime Rocky Mountain Gun Owners organizer Joe Neville could have served as the figurehead of the recall front group. It represents a significant departure from then-Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman’s standoff support for the recalls in 2013.

It should go without saying the House Minority Leader taking a director role in a campaign to recall majority Democrats from office is a severe blow to whatever sense of bipartisan comity that may have existed this session. The situation is further complicated by negative press the Nevilles received over their management of House GOP “independent expenditure” efforts this last year, which ended in electoral disaster and hundreds of thousands of dollars anomalously left unspent. Charging headlong into a recall campaign might temporarily deflect questions about their mismanagement in 2018. But will any of the state’s GOP powerbrokers be willing to invest again?

Whatever happens next, what we have here is proof positive that the House minority under Patrick Neville isn’t serious about governing. If Minority Leader Neville wants to personally run a recall campaign against his House colleagues in the middle of a legislative session, he should resign first, at least from leadership–and then perhaps consider why so many fellow Republicans would be happy to see him go.